Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

REPRISE -- Sutter's Mill-Stone: Herman Franks's Fallacious Fable

Reliever Bruce Sutter received
his Cooperstown enshrinement this weekend. When he was
elected earlier this year, there was a lot of hair-tearing
about it because the memory of
Sutter's career was of a fragile 1-inning guy who appeared
only as a modern "closer" -- a guy who got to walk
onto the field only to begin a 9th inning in a game his team
was ahead. The reality was far
different. I'm reprinting this piece from January for new
readers.

In the U.S. anyway, individuals' childhood life issues too
often become pillars of their management practice. Some people
are programmed to feel "it's not fair", and if they are
proactive, that urge may drive them to try to right wrongs. In
the more passive type personalities, that urge frequently drives
them to sit on the sidelines and wait for some unfairness to
happen, at which point they will point it out or complain or
whine about it. Because these people believe cognitively
that life is unfair/bad, when they hear info that asserts
something unfair happened, they are likely to jump on it because
it fits their world view. Sometimes in that particular case
that view is false, unsupported by the data or other forms of
reality, and since, more often than not, their complaints are
supported by data, they don't even bother to check to see if the
"news" is true.

This week something happened that was a perfect illustration
of the "it's not fair" chorus singing off-key.

Bruce Sutter was elected to Baseball's Hall
of Fame. Worse, a better candidate, Rich Gossage, wasn't, falling short again.
Amplifying the it's-not-fairness of the whole situation is that
at least one person with a vote suggested he's always
opposed Gossage but now that Sutter was in, he'd vote for
Gossage, which is akin to saying "I've always opposed the
froth-at-the-mouth Talibaptist maniacs in Iran, but now that our
ally in Baghdad is supporting them, I will, too".

A fair number of people have railed against the Sutter
installation citing the apocryphal story spread by Cub ex-manager
Herman Franks that:

Franks had developed the method of using Sutter only with
a lead and only for an inning.

In earlier seasons, Sutter had failed in the second
halves of seasons, probably from overuse, and Franks
learned to reserve/preserve the reliever for fewer, more
important, situations.

Sutter had therefore been the precursor to the classic
"Clean 9th" closer (term mine), coming
into games almost exclusively in a save situation, almost
exclusively at the beginning of the 9th inning.

There's at least one problem worth noting. Franks' story is
false on all three counts.

That apocryphal story is believed by many for good reason.
Bill James cites the story in his fine Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers. Paul
Votano reinforces it in his book Late and Close: A History of Relief Pitching.
In the discussion around Sutter HoF candidacy and his success,
many commentators, including my own favorite, Steven Goldman of
YES Network, have taken Franks' comments as frank. A small
handful support Franks and therefore Sutter (perhaps that really
they support Sutter and therefore Franks) while most oppose
Sutter cite Franks' alleged invention as an abomination and,
therefore, oppose Sutter's induction. Sutter is seen as some
fragile couple-of-batters trust fund kid who had decent stuff but
lucked into a cushy job.

These kind of problems occur beyond baseball all the time.
People hitch their energy to a story, either to support its moral
or oppose it, even when the story is a gilded telling of
something untrue, or once-true-now-passé. Detaching them from
that emotionally-triggered, behavior-shaping story is harder than
getting a $2 microbrew at a major league ballpark.

FACT: Franks never used
Sutter in a lead situation in a Clean 9th half or more of the
time.

Franks managed Sutter in Chicago from 1977-1979. If this
evolutionary innovation story was true, the actual pitching lines
for their final year together would reflect this. It doesn't.

Here's a key indicator, a chart that shows how many innings
Sutter pitched in each of his appearances in 1979:

Innings

~# of 1979 games

< 1

7

1

14

1-1/3

5

1-2/3

10

2

16

>
2

10

Franks was just as likely to use Sutter for more than an
inning as an inning or less. The mode average use was 2 innings,
the median 1-2/3. Sutter pitched 5 innings once. Bruce Sutter
wasn't the Woman of Kleenex, (repoz...you
must read that link) the foil to Goose
Gossage's Man of Steel. He wasn't Gossage, but neither was he
Tony Fossas.

Sutter's effectiveness and swell career stats are not
a function of being coddled. In his last serious season of use,
closing for Whitey Herzog's 1984 St. Louis Cardinals:

Innings

~# of 1984 games

< 1

5

1

15

1-1/3 or 1-2/3

10

2

29

2-1/3
or 2-2/3

6

3+

6

Median and mode average for appearance length was 2 innings.
If anything, it's possible that he could have had a longer
successful career if Herzog hadn't gotten him into 71 games where
he notched 122 innings (and I don't know how many times Herzog
warmed him up without putting him in a game once warmed).

Someone with better Retrosheet tools who wanted to could build
a chart like this for every season Sutter labored, but a quick
glance says the others would show a pattern similar to 1979.
Sutter was simply not a Clean 9th, quick-in-quick-out guy. Others
invented that rôle -- not Franks with Sutter.

FACT: The stats don't
indicate Sutter wore down in the second half of his seasons with
Franks..except for the last season in which Franks alleged he was
using him differently.

In 1977, Sutter was flat out fantastic. July and August were
brilliant, and even if you pour his crappy October game into
September and he still has a Baserunner/9 of 11.2 and an ERA
under 3.00.

In 1978, he was truly fine in July and truly poor in both
August and September. Franks didn't throw Sutter out there any
less. This one season is where he flagged in August and never
perked up.

In 1979, the year Franks allegedly managed him for lesser
first half use to preserve the reliever, Sutter didn't show up
until after the 11th game of the season. In April, Franks used
him less than he had the year before (over 11 fewer games, so
perhaps no different per game), in May he actually used him more
inninings and the same number of games as he had in '78, and then
in June, the same number of games and innings both. In the second
half of 1979, he used Sutter in more games and more innings than
he had in the "lesson learned" 1978.

It's clear that in terms of games, total innings, or length of
appearance, Franks never markedly altered his use of Sutter. And
again, Sutter was not the poster boy for the "Clean
9th" closer. Sutter has become a lightning rod for the
"it's not fair" folk -- the actual career has been
distorted by the untrue (probably not malicious, just not
verified) claims of a manager, the fact that bullpen use has been
dis-optimized by lazy managers and players seeking comfort in
highly prescribed rôles, the pursuit of a univerally-accepted as
goofy statistic, the save, and finally, the idea that somehow
he's being held up to Rich Gossage as an either/or Ahura Mazda
Less-Filling-Tastes-Great duality totem on which to beat 5/9ths
time. Ridiculous.

I have a research paper on what I believe
to be the actual origin of the Clean 9th closer. I'll run that in
some form in a different forum later.

BEYOND BASEBALL
The same sort of story distorts non-baseball organizations
regularly.

A friend of mine was working with a software company that had
their main product upgraded annually, always near the beginning
of each year. Technical support demand always went up temporarily
as a result. The people who worked in techncial support were
going nuts, because even though the company knew they were going
to have this predictable demand surge every year, they wouldn't
hire temps to sub for people who could do support or hire temp
support agents. Morale was rock-bottom in support and in customer
service (the people who got to hear the customers complain).

Management wouldn't try to hire any temp help. The
"reason", actually a creation myth, was that because
the software company had a contract to develop custom add-ons for
their main product specifically for a customer that was a defense
contractor, that everyone working in the company was required to
have a security clearance, and because it routinely took about
four months to get one, it was not feasible for the company to
hire any temporary staff. Everyone thought this was terribly
unfair, one of those insurmountable problems, like Soviet
Communism or the IMF that even though everyone knew it was a
terrible abusive failure, we somehow just had to learn to live
with and say "it's not fair" whenever we thought about
it or talked about it.

My friend was skeptical, so he started nosing around trying to
find where this draconian regulation was invented. Not,
certainly, but the Defense Department. I got to collaborate with
my friend on searching out the citation. Here's what we found.

The human resources department had hired an expensive
contractor to research what security requirements they needed to
apply and to whom once they started developing for the weapons
customer. The contractor had called someone at the customer's
legal department. The client's paralegal stated a truth, that
everyone who worked at the weapons customer had to have a
clearance. The contractor took that back to our company as a
requirement. They instituted it, and it sat unquestioned for four
years.

There was so much instituional inertia and fear of letting
this unfairness go ("what if they make the rule
that we have to but we've already changed it?") that it took
two more years and untold dollars and customer ill-will before
they actually changed the requirement.

People who see the world through "it's not fair", if
they're passive, can come close to sabotaging the very fairness
they crave. The best start to changing that is examining the
basis for the unfairness, never with the assumption that it's an
insurmountable given, that the story of why it has to be
is true, but asking the skeptical questions and following up
until, like a good historian or ethnographer, you know enough of
the truth to accept or spike the story.

Don't let your cognitive setting affect the way you make
decisions or view others. There's plenty of unfairness out there,
just not as much as people are programmed to see.

7/30/2006 09:33:00 AM posted by j @ 7/30/2006 09:33:00 AM

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

White Sox Lesson Part I: Coaching Your Players, Don Cooper Style

A big part of both First- and Second Base in the Management by
Baseball Model is coaching. That's observing, monitoring
and analyzing (OMA) your team members, helping them to
refine their skills so that you can apply them to your (and
their) advantage.

Major League teams' pitching coaches have primary
responsibility for the OMA part of the equation, and depending on
the individual team manager, have varying responsibility for the
application. The current World Champion Chicago White Sox had the
leading bullpen in the majors last year, and top-notch starting
pitching as well.

In this decade, it's popular to suggest the coaches and
managers don't make much difference in baseball and beyond. As a
management consultant, I suggest that's a cynical view fed by
episodic thinking -- people tend to focus on good management
having failures or more commonly truly craptastic management
getting by or even (temporarily) succeeding. The U.S. likes to
think of itself as a meritocratic machine, and outside of
baseball (which is relentlessly and chronically and perpetually
meritocratic and accountable), it's obvious that over the last
~25 years, merit has weighed less and less in the equation of
apparent success.

True, if you're the Yankees and you have an well-known star
filling most of your individual roster slots, one can argue the
good results are indendent of the coaching and managing. That's
an exception (and I take exception to it).

The White Sox have Don Cooper as their pitching coach, and while
the organization has dozens of people who share responsibility
for OMA of developing pitchers and the talent on the big league
team's squad, Cooper has lead responsibility for it. And when it
comes to application, it looks to me as though manager Ozzie
Guillen shares more than an average amount of the authority and
responsibility with Cooper. So while Cooper is differnt from most
managers beyond baseball in that he carries a higher proportion
of coaching burden and less other management load, his winning
approach is instructive to managers beyond basbeall, all of whom
need to have some coaching methods and skills.

I interviewed Cooper earlier this year when the White Sox were
in Seattle for a series. The Chisox staff was very helpful and
Cooper was generous with his time -- thanks to both. I had
multiple purposes for the interview (I was working on a research paper for the SABR National Convention
and wanted to do some fact-checking on motivations I had ascribed
to White Sox management decisions), I'd like to share pieces of
our conversation and call out some of Cooper's practices that you
should think about using yourself.

Don Cooper: So when
you talk about Management by Baseball, you're talking about
reading numbers and reading numbers only, right?

DC: First of all,
I'll say the main thing about my job is people management.
And challenging each individual to be to be best We look
at different areas, isolate them. We ask, "how can we
improve the lot we have now, no matter where we're at?".
So with Buerhle we ask "how can we improve his
game", and with Contreras, we look for how can we work
to improve his game"?

We set up everybody. We don't have
artificial paper-goals but verbally we set goals. And they're
not wins and losses. The goals are in how to be successful
with the pitching. And it's really simple and we do that with
everybody.

Two important points.

1) Coaching plans are customized to each individual, the
Chisox don't harbor the delusion that one-size-fits-all.

2) The objectives (what Cooper is calling goals) don't have to
be complex, and they certainly aren't based on metrics the
generation of which are out of the control of the individual.
Pitchers certainly carry statistics called wins and losses, but
most sensible people inside baseball realize teams win
and lose games, and only sometimes is it the pitcher alone that
caused either outcome. While it's almost a norm in American
management to attach an employee's performance evaluation to
factors outside her control, it's very lazy and ultimately
destructive. Measured objectives and accomplishments are great,
critical in many jobs, but make sure they're the right ones.
Outcomes are not pure indicators of the context in which the work
was done

Cooper continued, describing his coaching approach with the
team's #1 starter, Mark Buerhle. He talks about
"columns". He uses a tool that evaluates pitchers by
what they surrender, the frequency with which they give up hits
and the frequency they yield walks.

DC: First, there's
Buerhle. With Buerhle, there's never any problem in the walk
column. I will sacrifice a few more walks to the point of him
never giving in to a hitter and saying "here, hit
it" because when that happens, it's not just that simple
"here hit it" but it's going ahead & trying to
make a nasty pitch or a real good pitch. And when he does
that, he attacks, he does attack, but sometimes you don't
want to attack. What I mean by that is "don't give in
3-1". You don't walk many guys & I always have the
confidence that you'll throw strikes. And if now there's a
guy on first, you hold runners well and get ground balls. But
when you give into the hitter, it turns into doubles and
triples and possibly home runs. At the very least there are
going to be guys in scoring position.

If you can keep a guy just at first,
now it's going to take a couple of hits for them to put it
together to put a chink in your armor, or pin one on you, and
I believe good pitchers don't allow that many hits in a row.
There are times situations and days, yes, where they do
that, but over the long haul, that approach will make him
less vulnerable.

And the other thing we're
challenging him to do is to get the ball down when he wants
to be down and either hit the glove or miss below. And be in
when you want to be in, and that eliminates the stuff that
you see on Sportscenter, the stuff out over the
plate. And remember he has a good pick off move and gets
ground balls so the guy on first base maybe he'll be picked
off or doubled up - he has the ability to do that.

So it's subtle. Not really "simple" but relative to
the craft, pretty simple. And stochastic. Be aggressive and
attack in general but not automatically -- there's a
time for alternatives.

Cooper is preparing his starter to make independent decisions,
giving him heuristics to follow, not a computer-programmed
routine. When you coach your own team members, keep in mind the
better you prepare them for exceptions, trends, general rules
meant to be riffed off of, the less tied down you are to having
to manage sub-tactical chaff better managed by the team member --
he can do it more quickly and less expensively. And he can
proliferate these subtleties to his peers.

My next entry will continue the Cooper interview and his
important insights you can use in your coaching of your team
members.

7/26/2006 09:07:00 AM posted by j @ 7/26/2006 09:07:00 AM

Saturday, July 22, 2006

A Guest Essay: Innovation to Improvisation in Baseball & Beyond

One of my most esteemed
colleagues ever is Phillip Gordon. He has the uncommon
combination of vision and delivery (a minority of managers
have either). He has a fairly new weblog, Technology Translations, and he kindly consented to write an MBB
piece for me. It has less baseball in it than most of my
entries, but it's such an honor for me to have him on my
blog, I'm not worried about it. This draws from MIS courses
he teaches at Mills Graduate School of Business in Oakland,
California.

Innovation V. Improvisation -- Phillip
Gordon

Innovation is the new consultant bandwagon, and like so many
other consultant bandwagons, is something they all talk about but
no one defines, because, of course, when they sell you
"innovation methodologies," or "creative
thinking," they can claim that whatever results is
innovation.

But there is a lot to learn about innovation in the real
world, from baseball, for example: what it is, how to do it. In
fact, as my colleague Jeff Angus points out, baseball has
"The Book" which indicates to managers and players how
and when and to what degree they might be flexible; that is, how
and when to innovate. In baseball, "The Book" is not a
manual it's tacit, stochastic heuristics. So it's general rules that, if applied
universally, don't guarantee success, but if applied with context
and investment in the future in mind, yield what you need.

It has become extremely important for companies to be
perceived as innovative, however defined.

What was once central to
corporations - price, quality, and much of the
analytical work associated with knowledge - is fast being
shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians
Increasingly, the new core competence is creativity
It's about creativity, imagination, and, above all,
innovation. Get Creative!: How to build innovative
companies, Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek, 1 Aug 2005

For example, from the CSAA 2005
Annual Report: For many years it [innovation] was something
that, frankly, CSAA wasn't so comfortable with. While we
could always be counted on for stability, too often we valued
caution more than progress - and innovation was something
others did. Today we know better. Paula F. Downey,
President

For example, from an ad in the 29
May 2006 BusinessWeek: Less than a year ago, Ford Motor
Company rededicated itself to American innovation. And by
delivering truly innovative products we're doing just
that. Bill Ford, Chairman and CEO

So let's first define innovation, and then talk a bit about
one kind of innovation that doesn't require consultants or
methodologies.

What is "Innovation?"

The dictionary says, "A new idea, method, or
device." The anthropologist who built the groundwork for
that discipline's study of innovation, Homer G. Barnett, added a
useful distinction in his critical work, Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change,
defined it as "the essence of change... lies in the
restructuring of the parts so that a new pattern results, a
pattern the distinctness of which cannot be characterized merely
in terms of an increase or decrease in the number of its
component elements".

It doesn't always mean a new or changed product; it can also
mean a new or changed service,

Services now account for around
three-quarters of value and employment in the advanced
economies, and innovation is increasingly central to the
performance of these services in public and private sectors.
Service Innovation: Organizational responses to technological
opportunities and market imperatives, Joe Tidd and F.M. Hull
(Imperial College Press, 2003)

or a new or changed process (method), including whole new
types of businesses.

For example, the Toyota production
system led to performance advantages of around two to one
over other car makers in terms of quality and productivity.
Managing Innovation: Integrating Technical, Market and
Organizational Change, J. Tidd, J. Bessant and K. Pavitt
(Wiley, 2005)

It doesn't always mean something new; it can also mean
changing something that already exists.

For example, in the 1970s Xerox lost
about half its market share in copiers to a new generation of
smaller machines, which were innovative in the application of
existing copier technology. Managing Innovation

It isn't always something created by the person, group, or
company; it can be something bought or introduced from outside.

Much process innovation is about
configuring and adapting what has been developed elsewhere
and applying it - for example adopting world class
manufacturing (and increasingly service) practice. Managing
Innovation

It doesn't always mean adding something; it can also mean
taking something away.

[airlines] have been slipping
another row or two of seats into coach by exploiting
stronger, lighter materials developed by seat manufacturers
that allow for slimmer seatbacks. The thinner seats
theoretically could be used to give passengers more legroom
but, in practice, the airlines have been keeping the amount
of space between rows the same, to accommodate additional
rows. One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to
Stand, By Christopher Elliott, NY Times 25 Apr 2006

As our understanding of the history
of technology increases, it becomes clear that a new device
merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter. The
acceptance or rejection of an invention, or the extent to
which its implications are realized if it is accepted,
depends quite as much upon the condition of a society, and
upon the imagination of its leaders, as upon the nature of
the technological item itself. Medieval Technology &
Social Change, Lynn White, Jr. (Oxford, 1962)

It isn't always the "best" or even
"better," and in some cases, it may even make things
worse. Microcomputers couldn't do what
mainframes did, but they were vastly cheaper to buy and to
operate. PCs couldn't do what mainframes or minicomputers did,
but they were vastly cheaper to buy and to operate.

It may not be useful until other innovations are available, a
systemic innovation as opposed to an autonomous innovation.

some innovations are
fundamentally systemic - that is, their benefits can be
realized only in conjunction with related, complementary
innovations. To profit from instant photography, Polaroid
needed to develop both new film technology and new camera
technology. Similarly, lean manufacturing is a systemic
innovation because it requires interrelated changes in
product design, supplier management, information technology,
and so on. When Is Virtual Virtuous?, Henry W.
Chesbrough
and David J. Teece, Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, pg. 3

It isn't always radical, leading to a degree of change that
many companies, or even whole industries, cannot adopt or adjust
to; instead, it can be incremental, leading to a degree of change
that may be more easily adopted, within a company or across an
industry.

Most organizations are good at
incremental innovation and exploitation as they build and
develop existing knowledge and capabilities. They are less
successful at creating the conditions for radical innovation.
Innovation In Organizations From A Complex Adaptive
Systems Perspective, Ysanne Carlisle and Elizabeth McMillan,
paper presented at Complexity, Science and Society Conference
Sep2005, University of Liverpool

It isn't always the work of an isolated genius, or "two
guys in a garage;" it can also be the result of "small
world" networks, or of deliberate, structured efforts by
groups or companies to "manage" innovation.

tracing the history of key
innovations in art, science, and politics in ancient Western
and Eastern worlds [shows only two who] fit the loner model,
a finding supported by historians and cultural sociologists
who have shown in great detail that the creativity of many
key figures all abided by the same pattern of being
embedded in a network of artists or scientists who shared
ideas and acted as both critics and fans for each other
Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World
Problem, Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro, Am J Sociology 111,
no. 2 (Sep2005), pg. 448

In fact, even if it starts as the work of one person, an
entrepreneur, the development, spread, and adoption of innovation
is a process embedded in a social and cultural context, a process
that can foster and encourage, or hinder, innovation and its
spread and adoption.

So it seems that innovation doesn't have to involve expensive
high technology or lead to changing business as we know it
forever, and doesn't even have to make you uncomfortable.

In fact, innovation can involve improvisation, variations on a
theme within a set of governing rules. Baseball, football,
cooking, and jazz are examples of improvisation.

Baseball Improvisation
Take Doug Melvin, general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers. He improvised with pitchers, changing the
mentality that starters "start" a game, and relievers
finish a game. Instead, relievers start a game and then starters
come in during the critical late innings. Not a revolution, just
an improvisation.

Take Mike Hargrove, manager of the Seattle Mariners. Their
pitchers had a terrible start to the season, so Hargrove called
several standard mass team meetings where he outlined strategies
and players didn't respond. So he improvised with one-on-one meetings, where he
laid out the same principles as before. But this time, it worked.

Or most significant, take Billy Beane, general manager of the
Oakland A's. Hobbled by lack of cash, he improvised the entire
theme of a baseball team by putting together a set of
"rejects," focusing on critical stats ignored by
everyone else.

Beyond Baseball
Now some people may think, well improvisation is OK for baseball
managers, chefs, or jazz musicians, because they're all expert
professionals. But I'm just a (fill in the blank with a business
function). Well, yes, but you are a business professional. You
understand the set of rules, and you've been successful following
them. And improvisation is something that any business and
business person can do, because you do it every day, often
without thinking about it or realizing that is what you're doing.

Business people make decisions every day under pressure with
insufficient information. You should use a standardized process
to make any decision in life or in business; that will increase
the probability you will make the right decision.

...combine what was original and
daring in conception with what was patient and minute in
execution... Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (Oxford
U. Press, 1979)

What happens when you apply a standardized process under
pressure with insufficient information?

[Studies of firefighters and other
high-pressure decision-makers by cognitive psychologist Gary
Klein have shown] that they almost never lay out a set of
options before acting. Instead, they spend most of their time
trying to understand what's going on Once they have
that, the decision-making process [tends to be] based largely
on intuitive analogies to past experience. Cutting
through the Fog of War, M. Mitchell Waldrop, Business 2.0,
Feb 2002

Sounds like a definition of improvisation, right?

And if you need more evidence, consider that
the vast majority of product and service innovations are incremental,
another way of saying that they are variations on a theme,
improvisations.

Let's agree that innovation is important,
and not just because consultants or magazine writers say so. And
we can understand what it is, and it isnt rocket
science. And we can understand how to do it, because as
managers it is something we do every day: follow rules of thumb
in order to make judgments quickly and efficiently.

In other words, improvise to stay
alive: in a pennant race, in battle, or in business.

7/22/2006 09:06:00 AM posted by j @ 7/22/2006 09:06:00 AM

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The stupid think of the
past;
the wise of the present; the fools of
the future -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon is halfway right -- when it comes to strategic planning, you can
never count on what was past being prologue. The rapid change in the relative
strength of the various divisions engenders a different set of objectives to
arrive at the goal.

Most Major League teams' owners (except the
monetary-profit-through-losing-baseball Kansas City Wal*Marts & the
Pittsburgh McClatcheys) share a common goal: to make the playoffs. Note though,
the objectives a management team must attain to get to the goal are different
depending on which division the team plays in. And there are a bunch of lessons
for non-baseball organizations' strategic planning efforts in baseball's current
divisional contexts.

A quick rehash of the American League standings as of this writing illustrates the various
contexts.

Traditionally, the Eastern was the toughest division...For the last ten
seasons, the Eastern has had the winningest team 6 times, The Central 3 times, the
Western 2 times (a tie granted two different divisions an increment). To win the
Eastern, you have to beat the Yankees, and to have a chance to beat the
Yankees you planned on winning 97 games, super tough to do, and even then you'd
pass them about half the time over the last 11 seasons. Though w/97 wins you'd
capture an occasional wild card berth, and that's essentially equal for the goal
of getting into the playoffs. 97 wins in the Eastern Division would give you 4
divisional titles, 2 wild cards and 3 no-goals over the last nine seasons.

The Central has been more balanced, with most teams closer to .500, so
winning 92 games in the Central would have given a team 5 divisional titles, 3
wild cards, and 2 no-goals over the last 10 years. In 1997, 86-75 wins earned
the playoff spot.

The Western has been more variable, so planning on any fixed number has a
lower confidence return

But last year's winningest AL team was the Central's Chicago White Sox.
And this season, as you can see, the Central has been the toughest
again, with Detroit and Chicago both playing well over a 100-win pace so
far. So the 92 game win theory for the Central is a complete no-op for other
Central teams this season, teams such as Minnesota and Cleveland that have won
nine of the last eleven divisional titles between them.

In a long interview done over the break
with Jim Ingraham of the Lake County (Ohio) News-Herald, Cleveland GM Mark
Shapiro admitted he had been trying to put together teams that could win in a
weak division, not the AL Central of the last two years. The White Sox won
with 99 victories a year ago and were on track for 105 wins at the break this
year, four fewer than Detroit.

"We have to re-invent what's around the core, and we have to set our
sights higher to win the division," Shapiro said. "The original
goal . . . 88 to 90 was good enough to get us in the running every year.
. . . But that's not good enough to get us in the running right now, with the
depth of our division. And I don't think the Twins, who won the division
three years in a row, would win this division this year or last year."

Shapiro is not even remotely a stupid person, nor, do I think, are any of the
front office people of , but the Cleveland organization exhibited functionally
stupid behavior if they planned on feeling confident they could compete with 92
wins (or the 89-90 Shapiro stated as getting them "in the running").

STRATEGIC PLANNING CHALLENGE #1 - IN A
COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT, GOOD ENOUGH ISN'T
The first challenge is that most organizations are constrained to the highest
point on the yardstick they aspire to.

So it's usually true that an organization
that makes a primary goal of "good enough" is most likely limited to
that result, at best. (This ethic is most common in organizations where
accounting or finance people dominate strategy because this is a lesson they're
taught in grad school and it dovetails nicely with the cognitive map of most
finance people who are usually bookkeepers with power.) Sure, an outfit can get lucky, it's competitors
can stumble, but
when a "good enough" ethic is strong at the top of an organization,
the acceptance of squeaking by almost guarantees that excellence will be
unattainable.

And as "good enough" gets closer to perfect entropy...for example
an NL West state circa 2005 when San Diego's Fried Friars had their div's sole
winning record, and a peckishly positive one at 82-80 at that...the business'
strategic plan for "success" loses its apparent requirement of
excellence entirely. The aspiration usually becomes mediocrity because within
the system in which they live, mediocrity can achieve the goal. In this case,
it's getting to the playoffs, but in Sprint's or Verizon's or Cingular's case,
it's delivering phone service no more worthless than anyone else's, and that's
awfully close to undiluted entropy.

Even well above that entropic event horizon, though, there are pretty dire
consequences.

I worked in the marketing department for a company that had had a long
tradition of excellent-or-better marketing and technical support. The customers
expected both -- that's how they most identified with the company. As a result,
the outfit was able to charge relatively high prices for their goods. When the
owners brought in venture capital, the VCs brought in a new management team with
finance backgrounds. The president, functionally stupid in Napoleon's (and in
my) definition knew marketing and customer service were cost centers
ergo, it was important to be just "good enough" to squeak by. He once
told me we could stop marketing entirely beyond our contracted commitments because
the marketing had been so effective -- he called it Return on Image. The lure of
coasting on the past memes implanted in earlier times was an attractive option
-- but almost certainly doomed to fail. In this company's case, it failed
totally. They've had three profitable quarters in the past 14 quarters, and the
combined gains in the three positive quarters are smaller than a single
quarter's loss during that time.

Planning for "good enough" can enable you to squeak by but it's
more likely to lead to cherry pie time, and very very unlikely to lead to
serious success.

STRATEGIC PLANNING CHALLENGE #2 - GOALS
DEVOLVE TO HABITS FOR GOOD AND ILL
The second challenge is that more often than not, if a "good enough" strategy
gets any positive feedback (in the case of AL Central teams for ten years, an
80% success rate getting into the playoffs with ~92 wins), if soon ebbs from
being a consciously thought-out and measured goal to a habit, an unexamined
stance.

After a while the participants can forget why they made that decision -- it
becomes standard operating procedure. And if the "good enough"
cognitive setting types are still in control (& if they're in Finance, they
usually are) the original plan becomes internalized to the organization's
autonomic behavior set. They will "forget" the solid underlying
reasons why this approach was chosen, and therefore be unable to recognize it
isn't appropriate to the present situation. The Cleveland Indians are smart
enough to have avoided this particular pitfall (Shapiro's comment makes that
plenty clear), but most organizations beyond baseball aren't that smart.

The company I was describing earlier went down the tubes with cutbacks to
technical support and laughably awful marketing. They managed to survive with
clever financial ledger-de-main, although the SEC did ultimately punish
the firm's officers for it. But by the time they could have realized their
craptastic efforts were killing them, they'd forgotten that excellent marketing
and good customer service can make a difference (and had). It was as lost and
incomprehensible to them as the strengths of the script and plot of the original
Alien was to the nincompoops
who made Alien
Vs. Predator.

In the end, baseball always adapts. The Indians should have realized that the
White Sox' 2005 season, with their GM Ken Williams explicitly telling the world
the goal was never a single World Series, but back-to-back ones, was not a fluke
they could ride out. The Tigers didn't play it that way. The Indians are already
planning for the tougher world, adaptive to a degree to which most non-baseball
organizations are incapable.

The Ken Williams model, whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you, the
idea that nothing less than back-to-back titles, nothing short of competitive
excellence, was "good enough", is the winner's model -- and the
only probable escape from Strategic Gotcha #3.

In a future entry, I'll explain Strategic Gotcha #4, closely related to #3, but about style/tendency instead of about the amount of quality required to be considered success.

7/19/2006 07:02:00 AM posted by j @ 7/19/2006 07:02:00 AM

Friday, July 14, 2006

Dave Kurlan's Sales Wisdom of Baseball

I think y'all know I make a big effort to get people thinking about great MBB
examples of their own. Early this month, my buddy Talmage Boston wrote his own very
insightful MBB
interpretation for the
Dallas Business Journal, using this year's Texas Rangers as his fodder. That
was great.

Further, I had a remarkably pleasant surprise late last month when I
got to speak with David Kurlan, who wrote a book last year using baseball
examples and structures to help sales people sell better. It's called "Baseline
Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About
the Game of Baseball". Kurlan's work had nothing to do w/my
encouragement -- he didn't even know I existed or MBB existed until last month.
Like the Indian Pachisi and the Aztec game Patolli which are close to identical,
there was no transmission of data, but independent creation.

Dave wrote an insightful and cool entry on his weblog called How
to Eliminate the Effect of the 80/20 Rule on your Sales Force. The essential
lesson is this: while sales pros accept the idea that on a sales staff, 20% are
winners, 20% are losers, and 60% are medium, Kurlan's practice (Objective
Management Group) has found after testing 250,000 salesfolk that the talent
split was 6% great, 20% fine and 74% neither.

In sales, The Talent Is The Product, so it's not surprising that sales
people have roughly the same ability distribution as pro ball players. The
numbers that follow are from an old Baseball America study, but the numbers are
fairly constant. They show of signed players what percent survive to other
levels. About 75% never make it past AA, about 11% ever make it to the majors
and about 6% ever have a "career", that is at least a few years of
part- or full-time duty.

Level

Percentage

Signed

100%

Class
A

86%

Class
AAA

46%

Majors

11%

His prescription for sales people is very similar to that baseball uses for
its talent. Just as baseball uses Observe, Measure & Analyse to build a plan
to refine skills and to figure out who to keep and who to let go, Kurlan
believes:

Next, evaluate your sales force to
determine which of your salespeople can become overachievers and what it will
take for them to accomplish that.

Then, hire overachievers, using a best
practices sales recruiting process and an accurate assessment to predict
whether the candidates will succeed in a sales position in your business.

Finally, hold everyone accountable to these
loftier expectations.

Details in his
article. Nose around his work; I think if you work with Sales, it'll be very
enlightening. If you don't work with Sales, take a look anyway; it holds
insights for most disciplines where The Talent Is The Product.

7/14/2006 09:01:00 PM posted by j @ 7/14/2006 09:01:00 PM

Saturday, July 08, 2006

The Rewiring of the Tigers: Jim Leyland Shuts Out Chainsaw Al Dunlap

A GUEST COLUMN BY BILL PEPER

These are the best of times for Detroit baseball fans. After
enduring twelve consecutive losing years, the Tigers have shocked
the baseball world by posting the best record in baseball at
mid-season. The fans are more energized than anytime since 1987,
the Tigers' last playoff appearance, and tickets are selling
fast.

One major difference this year is the change in field manager
- the club succeeded in getting 1997 World Series-winning Jim
Leyland out of retirement and at the Bengals' helm.

It is difficult to assess Jim Leyland's managing given the
phenomenal performance of the 2006 Tigers. Every manager is a
genius when everything is going perfectly. But Leyland's actions
thus far illustrate two important management lessons that are as
valid beyond baseball as they are within it: great managers
consistently place their staffs in the best possible position for
their organizations to succeed; and a manager can act as a
critical leverage point for the organization, having the ability
to achieve much different results from the same basic group of
employees.

In this article, we'll examine the first of these business
lessons, but first, a little background.

Jim Leyland's hiring generated little attention in Detroit
last winter, obscured by the NFL Lions' coach Steve Mariucchi's
firing, Detroit's hosting of the Super Bowl, and the excellent
regular seasons of the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons. Leyland
succeeded the two managers with the worst winning percentages in
the 105-year history of the Tigers - Luis Pujols (.355) and Alan
Trammell (.383). Low expectations made it difficult for Tiger
fans to get very angry about the Tigers' futility.

The Tigers hit rock bottom in 2003, fielding arguably the
worst team in the history of baseball. (To understand just how
bad that team was, this year's Tigers eclipsed the 2003 win total
in 68 games.) The 2003 Tigers transformed into the 1927 Yankees
during the last week of the season to avoid the embarrassment of
losing more games in a single season than any other team in major
league history.

After improving in 2004 (after all, it is hard to be THAT bad
two years in a row), the 2005 Tigers created some buzz by
flirting with .500 in late August. But the Tigers collapsed,
losing 24 of their last 32 games. Worse yet, Trammell lost
control of the clubhouse. Not even fond memories of 1984 and a
career as the Detroit Tigers' best shortstop ever could save
Trammell's job. Listeners to Detroit sports talk radio flooded
the airwaves as the Trammell Era mercifully drew to a close,
complaining about Trammell's poor managing and Mike Illitch's
terrible record as an owner. Some even dared to suggest that
Illitch was worse as a Tiger owner than William Clay Ford has
been for the Lions over the past generation. (The Lions' record
was 5-25 for the two seasons prior to Trammell's firing.)

Leyland inherited a Tiger team with a realistic possibility of
becoming the franchise's best in the post-Sparky Anderson era.
Important position players hampered by injuries during 2005
(Magglio Ondonez and Carlos Guillen) figured to return and
contribute. Talented young pitchers including Justin Verlander,
Joel Zumaya, and Jason Tada were poised to join newly-acquired
free agent Kenny Rogers and Jason Bonderman in the rotation.

Perhaps most importantly, Trammell's departure increased the
likelihood that Pudge Rodriguez would bounce back from his
terrible season on (and off) the field in 2005. The
post-steroids-testing, much-slimmer Pudge batted .276, drove in
just 50 RBI in 504 at-bats, and hit into more double plays (19)
than his walk total (11) for the season -- far outweighing his
tremendous defensive play.

Pudge, in a non-divorce year, would almost certainly
contribute more at the plate. For cogent analysis of Pudge's
decline in 2005 and why he likely would improve in 2006, see this
MotownSports article. And this blog notes some of Pudge's antics last
year, as well as the general dysfunction that existed in
Tigerland at the end of 2005:

That's the background against which Leyland took over.

I promised you a couple of Leyland lessons. Here's the first.

Lesson 1: Great managers
consistently place their players in the best possible position
for the organization to succeed.
Except for a handful of situations, the on-the-field strategies
of Trammell and Leyland are indistinguishable. While double
switches and a squeeze bunt excite analysts and incite labels of
"genius", game tactics are vastly overrated in
assessing managers.

Virtually all important managerial decisions occur away from
the field. This is where managers can have their greatest
influence.
Leyland was decisive in selecting his team. He cut Carlos Pena
and Franklyn German, two highly-talented, enigmatic players
acquired with Jeremy Bonderman in the Jeff Weaver deal. They
failed to earn their spots despite several chances, so they had
to go. Leyland also cut Nook Logan, the speedy centerfielder,
handing the job to promising rookie Curtis Granderson. He kept
Marcus Thames, well-respected by his teammates for his hitting
ability and his perseverance in the Tigers' minor league system
for many years. In 2005, Alan Trammell kept Bobby Higginson over
Thames, generating a great deal of frustration within the locker
room. Getting the right people on the bus is a critical first
step for any successful organization.

Leyland's nuanced handling of several personnel issues
provides a lesson for all managers.

He recognized the talents of key young pitchers and provided
them the opportunity to contribute right away. Leyland, for
example, put 23-year old Justin Verlander in the starting
rotation despite limited minor league experience and a major
league career consisting of two poor starts. He also moved top
pitching prospect, 21-year old Joel Zumaya, to a key role in the
bullpen despite never pitching in relief before. Leyland kept
24-year old Jason Tada with the club to start the season to give
him a taste of the big leagues, before sending Tada to Toledo to
join the starting rotation. Leyland also inserted 24-year old
Zack Minor into the starting rotation to replace injured Mike
Moroth.

Contrast these decisions with the pressure that Leyland faced
early in the season. Chris Shelton channeled Lou Gehrig for the
first few weeks of the 2006 season - hitting 9 home runs in the
Tigers' first 13 games. Shelton got off to hot start in 2005 as
well after replacing a struggling Carlos Pena, hitting .345
before the All-Star break. He hit .272 for the rest of the year.
Trammell quickly moved Shelton to the number 3 spot in the
lineup, where he remained for the rest of the season.

Leyland kept Shelton hitting sixth despite his early heroics.
His reasoning: don't interrupt what was working. Leyland told the
media that he also wanted to avoid putting additional pressure on
Shelton. Leyland wanted to remove the possibility of having to
move Shelton down in the lineup if his bat eventually cooled off
- which it has. Interestingly, Pudge Rodriguez has hit third all
year despite a number of Tiger hitters with better production.
Leyland understands that keeping Pudge happy is top priority,
given his critical catcher responsibilities and importance in
maintaining clubhouse harmony. Had Pudge not been a Tiger, it is
hard to say if Leyland would have moved Shelton up in the lineup
earlier in the season.

Leyland's bullpen handling reinforces the first lesson. He put
players in the best possible position to help a team succeed in
the present, while still looking out for their future
development.

Todd "Maalox Moments" Jones started 2006 on the
disabled list. In his absence, Fernando Rodney pitched
brilliantly - not yielding a single run until his 14th appearance
on May 9. Joel Zumaya also has emerged as a fan favorite in
relief, routinely throwing 100+ M.P.H., and handling pressure
situations well in general. Despite a 1-5 record and an ERA
hovering over 6.00 for most of the season, Jones has remained the
club's primary closer. Rodney has come back to earth after his
hot start, but he has pitched better than Jones overall.

Leyland understands all too well that a reliever's ERA is
largely irrelevant. The closer's job is to cement a win, and
Jones is 22 of 25 in save situations this year (even if the mere
mention of his name causes anxiety among the Tiger faithful.)
Jones has a long history of success as a major league closer and
the quirky personality needed for the job. He is able to rebound
from a bad outing - although rarely without allowing the go-ahead
run to get in scoring position and surrendering warning track fly
balls.

Rodney held the closer role for parts of 2003 and 2005, and he
did not perform exceptionally well. Zumaya, despite his electric
arm, has given up several critical home runs, and no one knows
what would happen if he blew several consecutive saves, so
Leyland uses him carefully in his outings. Down the road, Rodney
or Zumaya may become excellent closers. Jones seems destined to
retain the closer role until he fails to perform - and Leyland
determines that the Tigers have a better chance of winning by
switching to a different closer.

Leyland knows that the immediate issue is not who is or will
be the best closer on the team, but rather how to use the
pitchers on this team to maximize this team's chances to win. He
needs all three of his situational relievers to perform if the
Tigers are to make the playoffs. Remember that Mariano Rivera
spent 1996 setting up John Wetteland for the New York Yankees.
Leyland's personnel decisions demonstrate his willingness to
treat each situation on its own merits. Within the span of a few
months, Leyland cut two talented players, accelerated the
development of important pitching prospects, named another top
prospect (who had never pitched in relief) as a key reliever,
protected two veterans from difficult situations that may have
impeded their development, and carefully resisted disturbing his
successful lineup.

BEYOND BASEBALLThis lesson of using employees wisely affects all
businesses.

I am a facilitator within General Motors' Standards for
Excellence, a voluntary continuous improvement process. A
dealership I visit experienced decreasing customer satisfaction
results shortly after buying two additional GM brands. After
observing the service department for several hours, the reason
for the decrease in customer satisfaction was obvious. The
service manager, an incredibly talented and dedicated employee,
was attempting to manage, supervise employees, dispatch - as well
as keeping customers informed and redelivering every vehicle,
tasks that the service advisors should do. Under the system as it
existed, his service advisors did little after writing the repair
orders.

Despite the service manager's talent, he could not fulfill his
managerial responsibilities, and supervise the technicians and
service clients when the volume of work increased. He needed a
Herculean effort to pull this off prior to the expansion, and the
added workload simply made it impossible for him to succeed.

Although the service advisors lacked the manager's overall
automotive expertise, they had much more time to keep customers
informed of the repairs and explain what was done to the
vehicles. The improved distribution of work has increased
business, raised customer satisfaction significantly, reduced
stress on the manager, and greatly improved morale within the
service department.

The issue was never who was best at writing up the cars, but
rather how could the service department best use all of its
resources to achieve maximum benefit for the organization and its
clients. The ability of a manager to make sure that the right
person is performing the right job - establishing processes that
lead to success - is an undervalued, yet vital, skill.

As Leyland has done with the Tiger bullpen, we did for our
dealership. Now everyone is contributing to the success of the
service department.

In Part II of this entry, I'll describe how Jim Leyland has
used his management position to act as a critical leverage point
for the organization, achieving much different results from
essentially the same group of employees.

Bill Peper is an attorney, writer,
and professional facilitator. He is a die-hard Detroit sports
fanatic. You may contact him at wlpeper at comcast dot net

7/08/2006 05:56:00 AM posted by j @ 7/08/2006 05:56:00 AM

Monday, July 03, 2006

Part II -- Dontrelle as a Magic Crystal : How Are the '06 Marlins Doing It?

In Part I, I talked about how people had
underestimated this year's Florida Marlins and how researcher Don Malcolm had used dead reckoning to calmly
ascertain that while they would likely not be good enough to play
.500, they were very unlikely to lose the 100 games most experts
expected. The cause for the general panic was that the 2006
Marlins, like the 1998 Florida Marlins, were undergoing a serious
strip-down of known talent and using as replacements mostly
rookies. While most promising rookies have a chance to succeed,
most won't actually have a good career. And as a rule, a team
that's mostly inexperienced struggles to escape long losing
streaks and the poor morale that surpresses achievement.

So while we had Malcolm to describe to us how the experts
failed to measure actual run potential, it's still worth knowing how the Marlins are
succeeding at their higher-than-expected accomplishment (35-43
through today, with a 24-12 record since May 21).

KNOWLEDGE MANGLEMENTI think a description of one key factor is a New York Times article from June 23 by Lee
Jenkins, Money Talks, but Sometimes It Doesn't.

The Florida Marlins' latest
makeover started the day that pitcher Dontrelle Willis walked
into the clubhouse with a boxful of hand-me-downs.

When Willis opened the box, revealing a pile of colorful
vintage jerseys from different sports and different teams, he
kept at least one baseball tradition alive in South Florida.

"I had to tell the guys about Throwback Fridays,"
Willis said. "Everybody here wears throwback jerseys to
the stadium on Fridays. That's been our thing for
years."

Most players on the current roster did not know Throwback
Fridays from Two-Dollar Tuesdays.

So there's a critical alarm, something that should be a
problem. Dontrelle Willis is 24 years old, one of two
young star-quality players the Fish kept, the other being 23 year
old Miguel Cabrera.

In the practice of knowledge management (KM) it's a common
observation that the amount of institutional memory (unwritten
and written rules about how things are done in general and what
the exceptions are and why and how to react to those) that is
clear and actionable provides a ceiling on how successful an
organization can be. And it's clear from that little article
opener that it's close to zero. As Chicago White Sox pitching
coach Don Cooper told me this Spring, "You always would like
the players to come to you knowing everything they need to, but
you can't count on it". And that's just the baseball
on-field part of their knowledge. The subtle codes of behavior,
to each other, with the coaching staff and front office, with the
fans, with opponents, little of that is the same in the minors.
So as a rule it's the veterans who pass this on to the
youngsters, in baseball and in non-baseball endeavors.

So knowledge management should be a fluster-cluck in
Florida.

Even though Willis is a
World Series champion and a Cy Young award runner-up, he
blends into the romper room. In the dugout, he keeps up a
running commentary about batters. On the mound, he acts as if
he is a hyperactive point guard. After someone makes an
error, Willis provides a pep talk. After someone makes a
diving play, Willis showers him with praise.

Fortunately, Dontrelle Willis is a
hyper-extrovert. He would be even if he was the only young player
on a team of veterans. He's very loose and puts himself on
familiar terms with everyone he can. Off and on the field, he
exceeds by a handful of standard deviations the norm of
cheerleading for his team and his fellow players.

And he's a very good pitcher, not a scrub. Cabrera, while an
introvert, is 3rd in the National League in Baseball Prospectus' table for Equivalent Average
(a one-number measure for a player's batting quality), and that
alone give him a small amount of leadership potential.

Why does there seem to not be a KM problem? I invite other KM
practicioners or people who invest thinking in these issues to
ante up their own ideas. The Marlins have opened my eyes to a
possibility I haven't seen or considered before: That if the level
of knowledge is typically low, it's a problem, but if it goes so
far below a threshold that anyone would consider
"normal" or "acceptable" and if you have a
staff of individuals committed to competing (and virtually all
ballplayers who get to AA or higher are very committed to
competing), that the team will make itself committed to building
process and method and working with other team members to do what
it takes to succeed.

The Marlins are like a
college team that gets living expenses. They play soccer with
a water bottle. They give each other piggyback rides. They
fight over copies of Baseball America. When catcher Matt
Treanor hit his first career home run here Tuesday, he
sprinted around the bases, because he said that was what his
high school coach taught him to do.

I'm suggesting that a strip-down of the magnitude the 2006
Marlins are facing is so extreme, they may be capable of missing
out on the inefficiencies you'd get with a half-way purge. In the
more usual half-way model, there is enough institutional
knowledge to do some things well, most things not, and it's
net-negative. But the newbies don't know which is which, so they
just follow. The cost can be compounded if the surviving veterans
are suffering from any bad morale (and in a normal purge, bad
morale is more common than not), because they can teach the
newcomers that "spit happens" or "Â¿so
what?", and might even make only a desultory effort to
socialize the newcomers into the system.

These Kid Fish know there's not much model to follow, so they
are stable in the knowledge they have to find it out or invent
it. And beyond Willis and Cabrera, there's not much hierarchy, so
this lack of social development leads to a pretty democratic
openness to participation and a minimum of the destructive side
of rookie-hazing (how much harder is it for two guys to haze 23
than the reverse?).

It's not intuitively logical, but I think it's possible
that an organization can fall below a low-point of knowledge that
it's so obvious you are insufficient that people pull together to
make things work where if it was just a little short, those same
individuals might figure "it's someone else's problem,
someone who's been here longer".

FREEDOM FROM EXPECTATIONThere is another factor of which I'm more confident, which
is when you're an individual who wants to win and you're playing
for an organization expected to win, it's hard to lose. But that
same person playing for an organization no-one expects to win is
released from the effort of resisting self-flagellation.

''If you're the only rookie
on a team and you get shelled, you worry about what everyone
thinks of you,'' (pitcher Josh) Johnson said. ''Here, with so
many rookies, we don't worry much about anything.''

In a mediocratic organization, on which has internalized that
mediocrity is the norm, freedom from expectation might be a
limiting force, but in one where no one has yet poisoned the
staff with expectation of mediocracy, it can be liberating.

The Marlins have some promsing young talent...not enough that
it's likely they will be able to make it to .500 this year. But
these players and their coaches are in the midst of creating
their own social norms by following a couple of players who are
totally successful performaers and one who is a connector and
energizer. They could surprise again (well, not Don Malcolm) with
another "unprecendented" jump up in 2008.

It never ceases to impress me how much a good staff can
overcome adversity if not stopped from doing so by fearful or
protocol-bound management.